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BELLEFONTE — Assumptions and false allegations fueled by overzealous investigators and wild dreams of a financial windfall led eight men and two eyewitnesses to smear Jerry Sandusky with allegations of heinous sexual abuse, his attorney told jurors this morning in a closing argument.

"The system decided Mr. Sandusky was guilty and the system set out to convict him," Attorney Joseph Amendola told the jury of seven women and five men.

Amendola, speaking for more than an hour, implored jurors to look past the snap judgments of the media after Sandusky's arrest last November and the hawkishness of the civil attorneys who flocked to represent the accusers in the wake of a grand jury investigation into his behavior.

The Penn State board of trustees reacted swiftly to Sandusky's arrest and allegations senior officials may have covered up a former assistant coach's report that he saw Sandusky raping a boy in a shower a decade ago.

Amendola recalled how the board fired university president Graham Spanier and the longtime head football coach Joe Paterno within days of Sandusky's arrest. Paterno died two months later.

"I'll be the first one to tell you: if he did this, he should rot in jail for the rest of his life," Amendola said. "But what if he didn't do this? What if he maintained his innocence? His life is ruined. We have a fired university president. We have a dead coach. We have a tarnished institution."

"For the case he was working with, this is the single best closing argument I have ever seen," Oliver said.

Amendola spent the bulk of his argument dissecting the allegations against Sandusky and the evolution of the investigation, from an initial complaint in November 2008, to the start of a grand jury probe in June 2009 with just two accusers, to the publication of a story in the Patriot-News in March 2011 that compelled yet more young men to come forward.

After a year and a half, Amendola said, investigators only located two accusers — the now 18-year-old man identified as Victim 1, who made the initial report to authorities in November 2008, and the man known as Victim 6, whose 1998 report of abuse in a team shower never led to charges.

"Until Victim 1 came out, no one reported Sandusky," Amendola said, referring to the Clinton County man who disclosed allegations of abuse to a school guidance counselor and children and youth caseworker. Initially, the accuser said Sandusky had only touched him over a layer of clothing. Eventually, the allegatons evolved to include forced oral sex.

"The hundreds of thousands of kids that he had interacted with — not one of them reported him," Amendola said. Not one teacher, not one parent, none of them."

"It doesn't make sense, it doesn't add up," Amendola said repeatedly.

The earliest allegations date back to 1995, when Sandusky was 51. He took accusers to football games and allowed them to stay over at the team hotel. He even included some of them in his memoir: "Touched, the Jerry Sandusky Story."

"Now, not only do we have a pedophile who isn't a pedophile until his mid-50s, then he writes a book and puts the victims in the book! That's smart!" Amendola said. "Folks, you have to use your common sense. Jerry Sandusky took these kids everywhere. Is that what a pedophile does? Does he try to hide it, does he try to cover his tracks? Or does he parade them around?"

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